Creative Commons licensed image on Wikispaces

Central questions Delagrange poses within this text:

• What is/should be the place of the visual in academic inquiry and representation?
• What means are available, and what constraints are imposed, for ethical pedagogical performances in the production of scholarly digital media?

Delagrange states that these questions are important to examine and answer because “we are in an extended moment of remediation from primarily alphabetic performance on the page to primarily digital (visual, verbal, and auditory) academic performances on screen” (Delagrange v).

Her proposal: “”I make a case for designing multimediated alternatives to logocentric, linear print models of scholarship. I argue that digital interactivity and multimodality (particularly the emphasis on visual rhetoric and representation) provide opportunities for scholarly inquiry that have no equivalent in print, yet are equally as rigorous intellectually. In so doing, I also show the necessity of adopting new criteria for evaluating scholarly digital media that demonstrate the inadequacy of efficiency and transparency as either necessary or sufficient standards for scholarly work” (20).

Delagrange is not only advocating for recovering the overlooked written work of women but also “redefining what constitutes / counts as rhetorical practice” (21) based upon modalities that provide equality to everyone.

She wants “hypermediated texts” because they “hold out the possibility for a richer rhetoric that takes advantage of diverse appeals afforded by the contributions of images, sounds, animations, and video to the meaning of the text” (28). She believes that combining text and images connects both logos and pathos: “[R]eframing ideological formations as both cognitive and emotional” makes pathos complementary to (not subordinate to) logos (155). The additional layer of meaning provides a deeper investment on the part of the author and a stronger impact on the reader. Such a format provides more “inquiry and provisional understanding, rather than closure and mastery” (33), encouraging a sense of wonder instead of a “let me get this paper done” mentality.

In order to appreciate the depth of her argument, one should first consider her key terms.

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